I have seen Pirates of the Caribbean: Dead Man's Chest on so many unfortunate occasions. That's the second one in the trilogy and 90 minutes of it are boring. Fortunately (well, not really), it's a 2.5 hour movie, and there are some wicked cool stunts -- and fortunately (really, this time), it is on TV all the damn time. It's also not a very good movie. However, a poor movie can make for entertaining TV. Bad TV can do a lot for you, and it's an important garnish to your entertainment dish.

"Independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective."

Imagine a hay wagon on a dirt road alongside some train tracks. Now imagine a Japanese bullet-train speeds by.

The wagon and the train were alongisde each other for a nanosecond. The hay wagon's driver caught a glimpse of somebody on the train but he doesn't think much about it. He can barely tell the smeared faces behind the glass apart. These passing trains are sleek. They break up the monotony of rolling down this dirt road.

They're not too quick for the human eye, but they are too fast for the wagon driver's brain to comprehend.

These trains are your social media feed blasting along beside you on the internet. They're free entertainment. I'd argue independent art, free music, and free books are the nobler objective.

"An inexperienced film-junkie still in his larval form though might call it the best mobster movie since Goodfellas and he'd be unanimously fucking wrong."

The trouble with good movies is that people often try too hard to like them. Hungry people try too hard to like them. Students are particularly hungry for identity and for understanding and there's a lot to like in movies they've been told are great and there's no reason not to like them. Like scarves and black coffee, great movies pick up fair-weather fans, and more relevantly, gloom-weather fans. They can be powerful. These movies can cause pretty heavy impact, unloading weighty messages that free minds can't help but cull for meaning. It can be too much though. In the vernacular, they can fuck with young heads.